RESTART NUCLEAR WEAPON ESCALATION IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: 3/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Folly-History-Missile-Crisis/dp/0393540812/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis.
Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons.
1906 WAR OF THE WORLDS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Dutche with Professor Serhi Polki. His new book is Nuclear Folly, |
| 0:07.0 | A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is 1962. The White House is informed there's a red line and it's been crossed. |
| 0:16.0 | The White House is seeking an answer. But why? Why did Khrushchev do this? As Kennedy says, |
| 0:23.3 | in his first blush of analysis, he doesn't gain anything from this. He can wipe us out with his |
| 0:29.6 | ICBMs. He doesn't need to put medium range or short-range missiles into Cuba. He certainly |
| 0:35.3 | doesn't need them to put them in the hands of Castro's regime. |
| 0:38.8 | So why? Turns out that Khrushchev himself had this idea during a trip to Bulgaria in the |
| 0:46.3 | spring of 1962. What is Khrushchev's mind at this point, Professor? |
| 0:53.5 | Bulgaria was not an accident, because in Bulgaria, he was talking to rallies that |
| 1:02.0 | were organized for him by the communist leaders of Bulgaria, pointing across the Black Sea from |
| 1:09.0 | Bulgarian port city of Varna, |
| 1:11.6 | toward the Turkish territory, |
| 1:13.6 | where a few years earlier, |
| 1:16.6 | the US installed the ballistic missiles, |
| 1:20.6 | nuclear armed ballistic missiles called Jupiter's. |
| 1:24.6 | And the idea came to him to put an equivalent of Jupiter's to the Cuba next to the borders of the United States. |
| 1:39.3 | And as he said, allow the Americans to taste their own medicine. |
| 1:45.0 | Why he was doing that? |
| 1:47.0 | Because despite his bluff, the Soviet Union at that time in 1962 had no more than five or six intercontinental missiles, |
| 2:00.0 | ballistic missiles that could reach the territory of the United States. |
| 2:06.0 | While the United States at that time was building and more than that was deploying |
| 2:15.8 | the Minuteman missiles that could hit the territory |
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